Last seen leaving Pink Adult Entertainment on Route 308 on March 6th.
REWARD: $1000 for any information leading to her return.
My heart sunk. How long had the flyer been on the bulletin board? And why hadn’t I ever noticed it?
I set it aside and started removing the flyers that still obscured something underneath. It only took a minute for me to realize that Rain Adakai wasn’t the only missing girl on the board.
There were two more — Nia Alvarez and Jasmine Okoye — buried even deeper under the clutter of paper.
They all listed the dates the women had gone missing, but none of them had a year.
Exactly how long had the flyers been here?
“Hey,” I called out to Kaylee and held up the flyers. “Any idea how long these have been here?”
She looked over and shook her head. “No, but I went to school with Rain. I remember hearing about her right after she went missing.”
“Did they ever find her?”
“I’m not sure. Hang on.” She pulled out her phone and a minute later shook her head. “Doesn’t look like it. Damn. That’s so sad.”
I started replacing the flyers on the board, but my carefree determination to tidy up had been replaced by a sick feeling in my stomach.
Three missing girls in Blackwell Falls? Over a period of how many years? And why hadn’t I heard more about it?
I remembered hearing something about Aventine University — the alumni had been trafficking local girls — a few years back, but I’d thought that was the end of it. Had Rain, Nia, and Jasmine been part of those crimes?
Or was this something else?
Once I had all the other announcements back on the board I placed the missing flyers on top, over the notices for the VFW pancake breakfast, the Blackwell Falls Historical Society’s tricky tray (whatever that was), and the town-wide yard sale.
Then I stood back and took a picture.
The missing girls had nothing to do with me but I couldn’t help being curious. It wouldn’t hurt to do a little digging.
24
CASSIE
I closedup the shop with Drew, picked up a couple more things from my apartment, and drove my Subaru back to the Hawks’ house. It felt a little bit like driving myself to the guillotine, but what else was I supposed to do? I’d signed the consent form, had opted into the Hunt and all its consequences.
Plus it wasn’t like the Hawks didn’t know where I lived, and if I used Bram as a “get out of jail free" card then everyone in Blackwell Falls — all the people who mattered — would eventually find out about it.
Then I’d be stuck as Bram’s little sister forever, the good girl who’d thought she was brave enough to join the Hunt but had chickened out in the end.
Hard pass.
I’d signed up for the Hunt to make Travis Dorsey pay for what he’d done to my parents and Bram, but there was more to it now: a chance to prove, if only to myself, that there was more to me than just being a coffee-shop girl on the north side of town.
I turned into the pathway leading to the Hawks’ house and navigated my car through the trees to the gravel clearing. Therewas a three-car garage that I’d never been in, but Vigo’s orange G-Wagon was parked out front.
I pulled next to it, grabbed my bags — one filled with the things I’d picked up from my apartment — and headed inside. They’d given me the code to the front door in the Cozi app, and I’d discovered there were a lot of ways to use it, including a shared grocery list and housekeeping notes for Reva.
I’d also learned the house was a smart house, almost everything wired through another app Vigo had downloaded to my phone that morning. That was how Jagger had controlled the shades in my room when he’d carried me to bed, but the app also controlled the house’s heating and cooling systems, the lights, and a whole-house sound system. A lot of things were on a timer, but it was weird to know I could control them with my phone if I wanted to, like I was a roommate instead of a temporary guest.
I found the Hawks in the main living room, rap music playing from hidden speakers, Jagger on his phone while Vigo and Hawk played some kind of fantasy video game, complete with cloaked men, swords, and fire-breathing dragons.
“Hey,” Jagger said, looking up from his phone.